


Phantoms in the Drift

by leli1013



Series: Creatures lurk below the deck (but you're a king and I'm a lionheart) [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Journalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 08:13:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7353010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leli1013/pseuds/leli1013
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration of some pieces of folklore born from the Kaiju Wars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phantoms in the Drift

**Author's Note:**

> Because this has been sitting in a flash drive for over a year and I'm still obsessed with the world building in this movie.

A cab driver picks up a passenger in the sleek and bustling business district in San Francisco. The passenger asks to be taken to an address that no longer exists, having been destroyed under Trespasser’s feet; but the cab driver knows where it used to be and agrees to take his passenger to what is now the edge of Oblivion Bay. When the cab arrives at the location, the driver turns to his passenger and finds the backseat to be empty.

Similar stories have been common over much of the world for nearly a century, with drivers of all sorts picking up phantom passengers and hitchhikers and having them disappear once they reach their destination. Most such tales have been relegated to the space of urban legend and folklore, stories sourced from “a friend of a friend” that seemingly appear out of nowhere with little or no evidence to support them.  However, these stories tend to explode after tragedies and during times of great turmoil, which leads to no great surprise that they have abounded after Trespasser first towered over San Francisco seventeen years ago.

With the beginning of the Kaiju Wars came an onslaught of new pieces of folklore – superstitions, ghost stories, and urban legends.

**Miracles**

Some of the first stories to come out of the Kaiju attacks were the ones deemed by many to be miracles.

The first came out of San Francisco, hours after Trespasser was finally taken down in what used to be Oakland - the story of Baby Joy who was born during Trespasser’s assault on the city. Her mother, Claire Monroe, had been in labor for only a little more than an hour and had just entered an elevator on her way to be transferred to another hospital when the kaiju’s footsteps shook the hospital, stalling the elevator in between the fourth and third floor, trapping its occupants. Claire, her attending physician, Dr. Matt Ling, and two nurses, were trapped in the elevator for two hours while the workers tried to free them and the battle against Trespasser raged just a few blocks from the hospital. It was there that Baby Joy decided to make her entrance into the world.

Recently, I caught up with the now 17 year old and asked her what it is like to be considered a miracle by so many.

The blonde, green-eyed high school senior politely smiled and shrugged.

“I don’t feel like I was any more of a miracle than any other baby,” she said. “In fact, I feel like I was pretty unlucky. I mean, I picked the worst time to be born.”

When asked about how she felt looking back on her ordeal and the media coverage that surrounded her birth she said, “I feel kind of sad about it. I mean, I get why people look at my birth as such a good thing, something that gives them hope, but I get sad because no one ever mentions my dad. His name was Martin. He was crushed while on his way to the hospital. No one ever mentions that part.”

Another story of survival from the first days of war comes from Manila. There, two office workers were discovered eight days after Bulldozer passed through the business district, decimating the once bustling area. The district had been so badly damaged that officials announced that they did not believe there could be survivors; however shouts were heard in the late hours while crews worked to sort through the rubble to recover bodies. A man and his secretary were found inside a cubicle underneath several feet of fallen concrete and steelwork, the cubicle having somehow formed a sort of air bubble around them. They said they had managed to make through by eating pieces of granola the secretary had had in her bag. They also said that they were helped by another man, a priest that appeared to them in the middle of the night and told them to be strong and prayed with them.

The sight where they were discovered is now a church and the incident has been deemed an official miracle by the Catholic Church, whose number of followers dwindled in the following years.

The most famous miracle tale from the Kaiju wars is, of course, the story of Tokyo’s Daughter. The day of Onibaba’s attack was ten year old Mako Mori’s first trip to the city as she accompanied her ailing father and mother to a doctor’s appointment. When Onibaba made landfall she was separated from her family, left to wander the empty and ash covered streets on her own, eventually finding cover in an alleyway while then-Ranger Stacker Pentecost finished the kaiju alone in Coyote Tango as his co-pilot, Tamsin Sevier, lost consciousness mid-battle. While her parents’ bodies were never recovered, Mako was later adopted by Pentecost who by then had been promoted to the position of Marshall. As everyone now knows, this miracle child grew up to co-pilot Gipsy Danger along with the only other Ranger to pilot a Jaeger on their own – Raleigh Becket.

**A New Religion**

The appearance of the Kaiju in our world shook the basic beliefs of many, from hardened scientists to Sunday school teachers – the simple fact that such monsters _could_ and _do_ exist forced many to question their faith. Some turned to pre-existing organized religion, while many more became disillusioned with those very same faiths. Meanwhile, there were those who came together to form a new religion, one that continues to anger and frighten many to this day.

The Cult of the Kaiju can be traced back to the days following Trespasser’s demise, when a group of people gathered at the borders of the evacuation zone and mourned the monster’s death. Following the attack on Manila, the group grew and became increasingly organized with recruitment websites and numerous churches popping up in various Pan-Pacific coastal cities.

The religion itself, BuenaKai, does not hold a specific doctrine or have a definitive leader and easily adapts to local traditions and practices. It is a religion held together by the belief that the Kaiju were sent by the heavens to scourge the Earth of humanity’s sins. It is a religion populated by those who welcome the Kaiju apocalypse and now, years after their defeat, actively pray for their return.

**Ghosts in the Mecha**

Every branch of military all around the world has a set of superstitions and ghost stories; a category of urban legends of its very own. There are stories of fighter pilots who refused to take off without performing some sort of ritual. For example, one American World War II Navy fighter pilot panicked when he found his rubber Snoopy toy was not in his plane minutes before he was supposed to fly into battle, convinced that he was doomed to go down without it. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long before the Pan-Pacific Defense Corp developed its own catalogue of rituals and strange and curious tales. 

The entire crew of Russia’s Cherno Alpha, including its pilots, Alexeis and Sasha Kaidonovsky, would take a shot of vodka before launching. Pang So-Yi and An Yuna of South Korea’s Nova Hyperion would sing along to their favorite band SHINNE while suiting up. Meanwhile, America’s Hydra Corinthian crew would pray before every battle. Of course, these rituals were not fool-proof as by the day Operation Pitfall went into action only two Jaegers remained in existence – Australia’s Striker Eureka and the United States’ Gipsy Danger.

Originally piloted by brothers Yancy and Raleigh Becket, and later by Raleigh and Mako Mori, the Gipsy Danger crew reportedly had no rituals or superstitions when it came time to suit up for battle. However, it is said that Chuck Hansen of Striker Eureka would give his bulldog Max a “big wet kiss” before climbing into the Jaeger, although his father and co-pilot, Marshall Hercules Hansen has said that the dog wasn’t a good luck charm, “He just really loved that damn dog.”

Additionally, with the use of drift tech, a technology that verges on the edge of fantasy and science fiction, it did not take long before stories began to spread from Shatterdome to Shatterdome about the after-effects of having two pilots fusing their minds into the body of a giant machine. Every Shatterdome across the Pan Pacific coast had stories about someone seeing a Jaeger move hours after being disconnect from its pilots, sometimes even mirroring the movement of the pilots themselves. There are many who have come to believe that the Jaegers were at least partially sentient, choosing to function at greater capacities only when certain people were on deck, such as Japan’s Tacit Ronin powering up at a quicker pace when a particular analyst was in LOCCENT; or going further and harder than mechanically possible during battle, such as the legend of Horizon Brave firing a kill shot long after her pilots had flat-lined in their conn-pod.

However, the legends concerning the Jaeger program are not confined to Shatterdomes.

**Echoes**

Towards the end of the war, with the number of casualties rising and the yellow ribbons we once tied to our doors giving way to blue, odd corners of the internet began to be filled with a new set of ghost stories. Unsurprisingly, families and friends of fallen Rangers have also reported seeing their apparitions in their hometowns and old hangouts.

Since their defeat in Seattle, Rangers Trevin and Bruce Gage of the American Jaeger Romeo Blue have been repeatedly sighted moving between rooms in what used to be their local bar in Bakersfield, California and several young female gymnasts have claimed to have seen the late Pang So-Yi and An Yuna cheering them on in and around the reconstructed sports center in South Korea where they once competed against each other in gymnastics tournaments. Reports also abound of people hearing the sounds of Jaeger-Kaiju combat reverberating through old battle zones years after either mecha or beast stomped through the area. To this day countless claim to hear the 2021 battle between Crimson Typhoon and Hidoi in Bangkok, although officials have debunked the phenomenon which has been universally described by witnesses as scraping metal and terrifying growls  as the sound of high winds passing through constructions sites.  Meanwhile the few who guard the gates of Oblivion Bay swear they occasionally hear the voices of lost Rangers echoing off the twisted metal.

However, it seems that some ghosts are not limited to the physical spaces they used to occupy.

**The Last Jaeger Pilots**

The drift and the mind-melding connection between co-pilots is essential to the operation of Jaegers. When Jaeger pilots enter the drift, the process by which they connect their consciousness to man their mecha, they effectively enter each other’s minds, gaining access to every memory and every thought in their co-pilot’s head. Pilots reported an after-effect they called ‘ghost-drifting’, a phenomenon in where co-pilots found that the link established by the Neural Handshake remained, although muted, hours and even days after they disconnected.

Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori, along with being the ‘World’s Saviors’, are also the last surviving pair of Jaeger co-pilots. I met with the pair in Tokyo where they live with their two-year old daughter and a hyperactive bulldog-chow chow mix named Sparks.

 “We haven’t drifted in years, but we still feel that connection,” Becket tells me over tea. “It’s strongest when we’re asleep.”

Mori explains it even further. “We share each other’s memories and sometimes our dreams. Sometimes one of us will have a song stuck our head and the other will start humming along.”

Becket shares a distinction with his father-in-law, the late Stacker Pentecost, in that they are the only two Jaeger pilots to ever operate a mecha alone. While Pentecost’s co-pilot lost consciousness during battle, Becket’s co-pilot, his older brother Yancy, died while they were still connected through the neuro-bridge and it seems to have impacted both his and Mori’s experiences in and out of the drift.

The former Jaeger pilot is reluctant to talk about it but opens up during a walk around the property.

“I still hear him. It’s weaker now, and not as often, but he’s still there. For years it felt like I was carrying the both of us around. Mako hears him, too. It’s not as bad as it was before. Yance and Stacker, they’re still in the drift.”

Five years after the end of the Kaiju Wars and we are still haunted.

**Author's Note:**

> This little ditty was largely inspired by these two articles:  
> [One More For the Checklist](http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/one-more-for-the-checklist-53110865/?no-ist)  
> [Ghosts of the Tsunami](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n03/richard-lloydparry/ghosts-of-the-tsunami)


End file.
